Dianne Feinstein literally forgot her three-month vacation from the Capitol
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) breathtakingly selfish refusal to step down from her Senate seat may be benefiting Republicans, who get to watch President Joe Biden‘s judicial confirmations stagnate as they wait for the California Democrat to show up to work. But there’s little question that the hubris of Feinstein, who turns 90 next month, sets a precedent that is bad for the republic as a whole.
Feinstein, who took nearly three months of leave from the Capitol under the guise of “shingles,” returned to Congress only last week in a wheelchair and with a visage that makes Biden look positively like a spring chicken. Since then, Feinstein’s staffers have tightened their usual iron ring of security around the senator until multiple reporters caught a damning exchange, with one journalist asking the heavy-hitting question of … how her colleagues have responded since her return to Washington from medical leave.
BIDEN’S DEBT GAMES ARE ALL PLAYED OUT
“No, I haven’t been gone,” Slate and the Los Angeles Times reported Feinstein as responding. “You should follow the — I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working.”
When one reporter tried to clarify whether Feinstein meant she was “working from home,” Feinstein insisted, “No, I’ve been here.”
“I’ve been voting,” Feinstein continued. “Please, you either know or don’t know.”
According to Rolling Stone, Feinstein’s staffers have, for years now, had an “on-call system” to prevent the senator from ever walking around the Capitol on her own, citing their own concerns about Feinstein’s increasing senility.
“One person who did not want to be named recounted Feinstein asking a staffer for a memo, then responding with bewilderment when the memo was turned in the next day,” Rolling Stone reports. “These issues are longstanding: Last summer, almost a year ago, one person who had worked with her and asked not to be named said, ‘Her days are all bad days now.’ Feinstein’s acuity gets worse as the day goes on, multiple people told Rolling Stone, and staff have long tried to avoid her having any engagements after mid-afternoon.”
Feinstein represents the largest state in the union, nearly 12% of our total population, yet she has managed for years — perhaps going back a half-decade ago, to when her office almost surely blew up the lives of both Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford — to conceal an obvious and dangerous cognitive decline from an uninterested press and the voters who deserved to know.
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In the gerontocracy of Congress, it’s unlikely that Feinstein is the only fossil being propped up by staff — Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) is clearly being similarly puppeteered by staff, though in a more obviously mercenary way. But how many other octogenarians are beginning to cross the threshold between merely occasional forgetfulness and being a national security risk? Every senator is a one-in-a-hundred, and even so, it took Feinstein damn near losing her mind for just a handful of fellow elected Democrats finally to call for her resignation. And that was mere months after Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) endorsed her for reelection.
However awful the fact of Feinstein’s continued employment is, just remember, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. She’s just the useful idiot the press are finally letting us know about.